The Ultimate Ground
Every worldview has an ultimate ground or foundation. A coherent worldview (that is, a philosophy or theology) will identify their ground as an axiom, or a given. Incoherent ones will not identify it.
Let us look briefly at the ultimate ground of Leftism, Libertarianism, and what is called Conservatism, but which might more properly be called Federalism, Republicanism, or Constitutionalism.
Leftism is incoherent because it will not identify its ground. I am not sure why but I have a theory: Marxism is an attempt to come to Christian conclusions about caring for the poor without Christ; it is an attempt to use monsters called things like ‘the material dialectic of history’ in the same role that pagans used norns or fates and Christians use the Will of God, namely, a theory to explain the order of future events. Marx identified original sin as the private ownership of factories, and foresaw, after the Tribulation of the World Revolution and the defeat of the Beast and the Antichrist of Capitalism (this nonword is a verbal fetish that means nothing but which even conservatives tend to confuse with the ‘free market’) would see the New Jerusalem descend as if adorned like a bride, and all the rules of supply and demand and the disutility of labor would be abolished.
So, in other words, Marx is a heretic, and he will not and cannot identify the true ground of his theory because the true ground is God. Without a divine being to organize history and ordain the outcome of the Apocalypse of the Proletarian, the Marxist theory makes no sense.
The Left take their inspiration and their cues from Marxism, but disliking the cold and clear logic which leads from his premise that work is theft to his conclusion that mass murder is liberation, the Leftists adopted Marxism without admitting that Marx was their ground. Feminists, for example, use the same analysis to denigrate male-female relations as Marx used to denigrate employee-employer relations. The language, the hatred, the promise of utopia, the tactic of blaming all human sin on current social laws and customs — all of this is the same between Marxism and Feminism.
The ultimate ground of any worldview depends on what its partisans define as their enemies, whom they fear and fight, and their vision, which they seek to enact.
The enemy of Leftism is a croquemitaine called ‘The Oppressor’.
In Marx, for some reason, persons who invest money in businesses are the Oppressor. In feminism, for some reason, their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons are the Oppressor. Leftists are simply blind to threats not issuing from a given oppressor group, such as, for example, Mohammedan Jihadists. There is no category in their brain for such a concept: Newspeak does not allow them to form any coherent sentences where third-world nonwhites are the bad guys, no matter what they do.
For Libertarians, their ultimate ground is that life is valuable in and of itself. They observe that property and liberty are necessary for life, and they identify the government is limited only to those things that hinder and deter assaults and trespasses against life and property.
For the Libertarian, the Government is the enemy.
A Jihad is only a threat because it gives the government an excuse to stripsearch innocent airline passengers. Unscrupulous businesses introducing dangerous goods into the stream of commerce is not a threat because it is defined out of existence, or it is claimed private tort suits or coordinated boycotts by civic minded consumers are sufficient to arrest the harm, which is any case is less then the harm caused by state inspection laws.
It is clever in a reductionist way, but does not explain the sentiments of Horatio at the Bridge: if no libertarian is willing to die for the minimalist social contract called the state, then no all-volunteer armed force can, or should, or would stand in arms against a determined foe.
The ultimate ground of Conservative thinking is God. Outside of the Christian worldview, there is no logical reason to believe that the poor, the weak, the female, the stupid, the serf and the stinking peon is equal to the wise and great and beautiful to whom life has granted the crown and scepter of leadership and popularity.
The enemy of the conservative is the barbarian.
Since I am a conservative myself, if there is a blindspot to conservatism, I suppose I cannot see it.
When my fellow science fiction fans who lean Left tell me in all earnestness that DUNE could not be published today because rampant Islamophobia based on irrational race-hatred and xenophobic fear of THE OTHER has overwhelmed and flooded America to its last cranny, and that we are on the brink of erupting into Christian-led race riots, hanging anyone found in a turban from the nearest lamppost, shipping any lady in a headscarf off to concentration camps for hideous mutagenic experiments, and their little brown children to be ground into soylent green, my only desire is to slap my fellow science fiction fans who lean Left over and over again in the face until some semblance of sanity is regained.
The danger of the eruption of a new and virulent strain of killer Amishmen or a rush of Nun-Assassins killing thousand of innocent brown people when the Pope declares a crusade is more remote a fear than the fear that the cheese will fall off the moon and strike Wisconsin with enough force to tip the plate of the flat earth off the back of the cosmic tortoise on whose shell we rest, so that when the Pacific Ocean is upended, it will sweep across the plains of the tilted world, and slay us all. Unless witches hired by the GOP turn us into hamsters first.
So I admit there may be dangers from racist woman-hating patriarchs suddenly emerging from caverns in West Virginia by the millions to sacrifice all the gays and pederasts to Shuma-Gorath, and then burn the world with greenhouses gases in order to terraform the planet into Venus, but to me severity and the probability of that danger is vanishingly small, and certainly than the danger, for example, posed by wealthy, Western-educated sons of oil sheiks funding well-armed terrorist cells to commit mass murder on our soil, which is something that can actually happen because it actually did happen, and not because we deserved it.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
